I strongly feel that spam is a hurdle in the smooth functioning of any system. Too much spam has led to misinterpretations and chaos.
____________________________
(The possibly ironic spammy links have been deleted.)

I've changed the board to have 'admin' approve all newly registered users, so that has helped going forward. And I spent time last week clearing out all the spam users who registered from 10/18 back through most of September.

But this guy must have been registered earlier than that. I have a script to zap users and their posts, for anyone with access.

It seems like spam is really down since I've been approving new users. Are others seeing the same thing?

I deleted some spam messages from a few months ago in the last couple days, but I don't think there's been any new spam.

I'm not quite sure that I understand how the new system is supposed to work. Does the new system set the "User is active" setting to "No" for every new account? And the admins have to set it to "Yes" before the new users can post messages? (Often I can't tell that an account is a spammer until they start posting spam.)